Tim Winton - Eyrie

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent, haunting novel

I thought this was an extraordinary and rather brilliant book. It's pretty unremittingly bleak and after 400-odd pages has an odd, inconclusive ending but I found it gripping, very insightful and exceptionally well written.

It's hard to give much idea of plot because things emerge slowly and to give much away would spoil the book, I think. It is set in Fremantle, Western Australia and the protagonist is Tom Keely who is in bad shape - addicted to drink and pills with his life as an ex-environmental campaigner in ruins. A rather tense, threatening plot develops in the second half of the book, but it seems to me that the book's real theme is the question of how much good we can really do, even when our intentions are noble and our hearts are really in it, and whether following our consciences to possible self-destruction is the right thing to do. There's a very telling conversation about half way through in which his mother says, "You save yourself first, Tom. ... To save a drowner you need to be a swimmer. Remain a swimmer." It's a knotty issue which Winton treats with intelligence and humanity and to which he offers no easy answers.

The prose is excellent; lucid, easy to read and full of intelligence. This brings the whole thing to life, and I found that I really wanted to know about this bleak tower-block, the scorching and hostile city and Tom's hung-over blunderings and cynical take on the world. It doesn't sound like an alluring prospect, I know, but there is a wit and a humanity throughout which I found very engaging. Winton manages some wonderfully penetrating observations on modern life without ever being preachy or bombastic. As a tiny example, in a rather self-regarding restaurant, "As if resisting the catalogue of fetishes on the menu, she ordered briskly, almost offhandedly, and he found himself following suit. The waitperson stalked off as if aggrieved by their want of reverence..." I thought that a brilliant and witty summing-up of a place and attitude (including the deadpan use of "waitperson") and the book is sprinkled with similar little gems.

I think this is an excellent, haunting novel with important things to say and which is also very gripping and very readable. Warmly recommended.